France Debates Shady Africa Dealings After Bongo's Death

PARIS (AFP)--The death of Gabon's Omar Bongo Ondimba ignited controversy in France Tuesday as ex-president Valery Giscard d'Estaing accused the late leader of presiding over a network of questionable payoffs.

Africa's longest-serving leader and France's closest ally on the continent, Bongo died Monday in a clinic in Spain after more than four decades at the helm of the oil-rich former French colony.

President Nicolas Sarkozy paid tribute to Bongo as a "great and loyal friend of France" but Giscard shone a spotlight on the darker side of the late African leader's reign.

Giscard said the 73-year-old president had developed a "very questionable financial network" and that he broke off ties with him when he found out in 1981 the Gabonese leader was funding Jacques Chirac's bid for the presidency.

"As you know, we don't accept foreign funds to support candidates in France," Giscard told Europe 1 radio, recalling the 1981 campaign when he was running for re-election.

"I learned that Bongo was financially supporting Jacques Chirac," Giscard said.

"I called Bongo and told him 'you're supporting my rival's campaign' and there was a dead silence that I still remember to this day and then he said 'Ah, you know about it', which was extraordinary.

"From that moment on, I broke off personal relations with him," said Giscard, who lost to Socialist Francois Mitterrand in a runoff vote in 1981.

One of Chirac's former close aides, Charles Pasqua, said he was unaware of illegal party financing from Bongo's coffers.

"I have never heard, including from Bongo, that he helped finance someone's campaign," Pasqua, a former interior minister, told RTL radio.

"If he did help someone financially, it would be at the president's level that the question arises. Some are still alive. Ask them," he added.

Giscard described Bongo as a "quite likeable" leader at the outset of his rule in the late 1960s but said he turned corrupt.

"Over time he built up a highly-personalised regime based on a very questionable financial network and I broke off all ties with President Bongo at that time," said the 83-year-old former leader.

Bongo was the last pillar of an old-style "FrancAfrique" system of relations with former French colonies that allowed Paris to maintain its influence on the continent through a web of murky dealings.

"His demise does mark in a way the end of FrancAfrique," said Giscard.

Green deputy Noel Mamere for his part said France would not mourn the passing of a "crook" who hijacked democracy in his country and stole public funds.

"He symbolized everything that we have been campaigning against for the last 30 years, these incestuous mafia-like relations between African and French governments - of the right and left," said Mamere.

Paris magistrates said Bongo's death wouldn't close the book on two other African head of states under investigation for embezzling public funds to purchase luxury property in France.